


One of Many Circles

by Morbane



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Activism, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Environment, Gen, Magic, Worldbuilding, community action
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:46:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/733148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I guess I wasn’t surprised to find out that Mrs Bialosky wasn’t only about litter and rats and flower beds.</em>
</p><p>There are as many different ways of saving the world as there are people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One of Many Circles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kurushi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurushi/gifts).



> For kurushi & yasu.
> 
> With several thanks to [tricksterquinn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tricksterquinn/) for the beta!

We arrived at the site before dawn, the back of the Wreck loaded down with juice and disposable cups, sunscreen, water bottles, thick blankets, and a couple of folding chairs. We were prepared for a picnic, set for a day in a wasteland.

The air was moist. It was overcast. As per directions, I’d packed my raincoat, stiff and plastic in translucent orange, so bright that when I wore it on thunderous days, I felt like a piece of graffiti splashed against landscapes of grey and stone. (Then, when the skies opened, I always felt a bit more like a goldfish.)

Wearing bright colours: a directive for the day I had no problem following.

I pulled the Wreck up at the end of a line of five cars. Kyoko was at my window as I turned the motor off. “Hi Sunshine,” she said. “Hi —”

“This is Miss Yolande,” I said.

“Hi there,” Kyoko said. Back to me — “Mrs B says we need to mark out the parking spots for the rest of the cars. Can you help?”

“Sure,” I said. “How do we do that?”

“I used to help out at the summer Ag festival,” Kyoko said. “I’ll show you.”

So that was the first hour.

There were maybe two hundred and eighty cars in ragged double-rows in the cleared ground, and a couple of ranks of motorcycles in the grassy dip below, by the time a horn summoned us to the edge of the field. I was surprised. Volunteers were scheduled to show up at the site in two shifts: six AM and noon. Dawn shifts were no problem for me, but I’d thought more people would come later.

“It won’t work without a strong start,” Kyoko said. “Mrs B’s managed the numbers.”

Of course she had.

Mrs Bialosky stood at the front of the group with the horn, repeating the basics: don’t move past the stakes. Don’t throw until you’ve caught the eye of the person who’s catching. Be sure. Call out the numbers if you have to, but if you find everyone’s shouting at once, just wait. Don’t rush. If you get tired, signal by lifting your arm, and step out of the circle. If a gap opens up to the _left_ of you in the circle, move to fill it, but if you can, leave the ones to your right alone — we want to be going deasil when we move. Jenny, Vaibhav, Simon, June, and Miss Yolande will be adjusting the stakes as we go through the day. Talk to them if you have a question about the boundary. Tea and coffee, fruit and snacks are available on the tables to the left — we’ll be putting up a gazebo. Port-a-potties just beyond that, thank you to Jason of Burleigh’s Rentals.

Any questions?

Officer Jocasta Lyne from the New Arcadia Special Branch is here and so is Master Klaus Bachmann from the Institute and they’ll be keeping an eye on things. Councillors Jenner and Karesh will be along later in the day... so they say...

-A few laughs from the crowd and comments about the ability of city councillors to rise and shine.

I think that’s everything. So, are we ready?

-A genial affirmative mumble.

Let me remind you why we are here. We are gathered here today to reclaim ground that has been tainted...

* * *

This is _what_ : dawn. Twenty score of people enclosing a circle made by a pale of stakes. Four hundred people tossing little bags around the circle, throwing to right and left but never all the way across the grounds. We are throwing sacks sewn up with bright colours, dimpling as they are caught, miniature bean-bags, filled with grain.

* * *

This is _how_ : the coffeehouse. Mrs Bialosky saying: “To clean a site that had been defiled, the mystics of the Kethlun manuscript used spear-casters. One caster. He tied an enchanted cord to the end of his spear and threw it across the tainted ground into a target. Then he circled around, untied the cord, pulled it through, tied it to the spear again, threw across the circle... To handle the cord, he must bless it before each shot. To succeed, he must not lose his spear. What do you think of that?”

I was still frowning, imagining it: a horizontal web, like a safety net against some unknown height. Lines of shining string ruled out as if they were beams of light and the targets were mirrors.

“It could be done,” I agreed, in theory.

“And I thought to myself,” said Mrs B, “ _who_ could do it? What are the steps?”

* * *

I wasn’t sure what to make of myself, after No Town. What to make myself out to be in the eyes of the world; how to minimise the amount I had to make _up_.

Aeons ago, after the table knife thing, I’d spent a few shifts at the coffeehouse lairing up in the bakery. While I’d had good reasons for wanting my space, I’d discovered this only increased the duration — the durance vile — for which people were likely to treat me like an awkward invalid.

This time I could get around that part: I was barely even scratched up. I’d won, right? So, from the first day back, I came straight in the front. I wore a smile to match the choice of entrance: reassuring, everything’s OK with Sunshine and the world. I tried to wear it lightly.

I came in at ten AM one day, a little early for the lunchtime baking shift. Before I stepped through the door, I glanced over at that corner across the road, at the edge of the square, where the shadows writhed, and when I looked back, Mrs Bialosky caught my eye. “Sunshine, dear,” she said. “Sit with me a moment. Have some tea.”

She’d ordered a teapot for her table and she poured out a cup for me. She could have been waiting for me, or anyone, or an undefined opportunity. The booth just inside the door was Mrs B’s high court.

“Have you seen this?” She unfolded the city’s daily newspaper and tapped a full-page article. _Submissions Invited for Airport Route_. Subheading: _Troll Bridges or Toll Bridges?_

“No, I haven’t,” I said, because in recent months I’d taken the whole rest of the world for granted, in the way you do when you can’t make the same assumption about things closer to home.

But I knew the gist. Before the Wars, New Arcadia hadn’t needed an airport. During the Wars, the Katkarridges airport had all but lost its city. After the Wars, Katkarridges had become New Arcadia’s gateway to the skies, as New Arcadia grew. But the Katkarridges airport was fifty miles off west — and you drove west, northwest, southwest, and west again. The highways were linked together with the tarmac equivalent of sticky tape, going around craters — and bad spots. _Lots_ of bad spots.

It made sense that they were upgrading the route. 

Half of the page was a map. It was a seriously complicated map: contours overlaid with settlements (colour-coded when they were ex-settlements) overlaid with bad spots (hysterically labelled as twilight zones), and over all that, lines to indicate route proposals.

With its arrows and numbers, it reminded me of battle maps from high school history class. It _was_ a battle map, just a map of battles gone. A map of scars and bruises shaded dark.

“It’s accurate, psychically,” said Mrs Bialosky. “I’m pleasantly surprised by that. It means they expect the public to take the council’s appraisal of costs at face value. Do you see this?”

She tapped a point on the map. I saw: relatively widely-spaced contour lines on the New Arcadia side of the Ridges, and a ‘twilight zone’. But apart from those codes, the spot was bare of legends.

“They’ve set the minimum distance to a bad spot according to the Dee Institute’s 1999 guidelines,” Mrs Bialosky informed me. “That means that this pass — this spot where the slope broadens into a kind of saddle, you see — is out of the running.”

“Uh — why?”

Mrs Bialosky tapped the ‘twilight zone’ — an unusually dark bruise — again. “Too close to the bad spot. No, instead they want us to choose the southwest route — here, using the dam at the base of the Ridges — or a path across the Ridges’ main fork, which means a bridge across the gorge.” Katkarridge _s_ was plural because the central spine of the ridge split into two tines, running almost parallel, on their southern descent.

“Mmm...”

Mrs Bialosky waited for further comment, and when I didn’t give it, continued, “That’s going to be a very expensive bridge. They’ll submit the contract to an open bid, of course, but the word is that Burroughs Construction Company is going bust; by the time funding’s approved it’ll be Samridhi Corp or nothing. Which is fine for the council, but not fine for rates.”

I swallowed a sip of tea. “So the long way around is the least of two evils?”

“I am not satisfied with evils,” Mrs Bialosky said.

* * *

I knew what everyone knew about bad spots. I knew that they’d come from the Voodoo Wars, mostly. Mostly they were places where life had been lost, in horrible ways, or somehow changed, in worse ways. Sometimes the darkness fell so heavily on those places that the names and natures of those who had been cursed there simply vanished from existence, and where those names had been written or recorded, the record faded and fled.

What _everyone_ knew about bad spots was more than hearsay, too, because everyone who passed by one knew this: they were doors into darkness, malice at the back of your mind, madness and dismay.

We stood in our ragged circle and faced into this anger and fear and grey. At the heart of the circle was a wickedness poisoning the joy of the world. It beat out against us, like a malignant pulse, wave upon wave to wear us down. When we were standing there, we _knew_ that those waves beat out forever, and their grim grime washed up at our gates, up our steps, and into our lives. As we had walked up to it, our steps had dragged; standing against it, I felt as though there were no place to run away _to_. And yet I had run towards, and then away, from such a thing. Funny, that Bo had given me context.

In every direction, across that circle, there was another human face.

My shadow vision made strange things of the place. Have you ever looked up on a cloudy day and had to shade your eyes against the brightness of clouds? The air across the circle lay in the same uneasy way on my eyes. Spots danced.

I’d thought of all the little trajectories across the circle as threads of light drawn in the air, but they were the opposite — rips in the roiling cloud whose edges seethed against each other, seeking to mend themselves. Our job was to tear into them before they could, to scatter this unnatural air to natural winds. 

* * *

We’d practised on the lawn of a friend of Mrs B. We’d placed our feet shoulder-width apart, grounding ourselves. We’d breathed out on each toss. 

“It will feel heavy,” said Mrs Bialosky’s friend. “You will feel afraid, and sad. But you have to carry that, sit with it. When you throw the bag again, do not throw that weight on. Throw only your hope. Cast your courage across the circle.” And she had grinned. It was that grin, that mischief, that we caught.

* * *

Kyoko leaned in the bakery doorway, grinning from ear to ear. “They published Mrs B’s letter in the _Argus_ ,” she said. “They even reprinted the map.”

I skimmed it. _My attention was drawn to the excellent survey work on the arcane residue of the Voodoo Wars... increasing range of psychic disturbance in the last five years... presents a concern and an opportunity... I believe the Madamer Pass should be considered for development... If the argument against advancing on this route has to do with its curse then I wonder the council is not concerned its corruption may advance on us._

Kyoko said, “Either it’s not dangerous and they ought to cost it out, or it’s dangerous and they should be doing something about it regardless of the roads. We’ve got them either way.”

I said, “We?”

Kyoko said, “ _No_ -they-won’t-do-it just means that _yes, we_ can.”

* * *

I didn’t have a huge conversion moment, by the way. I didn’t rush up to Mrs B and demand she sign me up.

But this is my _why_ : I arrived at a Monday movie night to find Kyoko and Emmy sewing up little, colourful bags.

* * *

The first bag I caught felt like a little bag of grain.

The second bag I caught felt like a bag of iron sand. Its weight sank into my hands, and the miasma it dragged with it sank into me; all of me felt heavier. But I could see, in the air, the malediction that it had torn through, and brought home to me.

The eighth bag I caught felt like a medicine ball.

The fifteenth bag I caught felt like a rock in a sack.

The thirtieth bag I caught felt like a barely padded anchor.

And I tried to throw little coloured bags and nothing else; except, maybe, a line across the abyss.

Three people to the right of me, a woman in her forties and a younger man in a wheelchair reached out and held hands for a minute, faces strained. Then they dropped them again, and the man held up his hands, received a sack, and tossed it on.

I had to stop at the second hour and get a cup of tea. I wasn’t the first. I remembered to walk deasil out around the circle, even though that was the long way round. 

As I passed him, Ben, one of Mel’s biker friends, pulled out of the circle too, and walked with me, in bitter silence, for a while.

At the table, he said, “That’s about as much as I can take. See you Sunday, Sunshine.”

“Take care,” I said. I looked at him, trying to reckon his level of defeat.

He said, “No, I know. I’ll be right.” He waved his hand at the circle. He managed a grin, even though it was crooked. “Thanks for this.” 

I sat for a while under the gazebo until the roaring in my ears faded below the roar Ben’s bike had made. It was the only shade. It could be decades before anything sprang up here of its own accord.

I took a deep breath, and a gulp of water to wash down the dust, and walked back to the circle.

* * *

"36," I called, and threw a bag across to the man with that pinned-on number, and Yolande tapped my shoulder. “Enough,” she said.

I knew she was right, because I felt like sinking into the ground myself. I felt as though what I did might have started to be useless, many throws back, but if I just kept trying, maybe there’d be one worthwhile throw — “No,” said Yolande.

I realised I’d made it to eleven AM, and the wooden stakes were closer together now, whole yards squeezed out of the diameter of the marked ground. All of the volunteers I’d started with were breaking away from the circle, heading back to their cars. 

Yolande touched my forehead briefly. “Rest,” she said. “I will see you at home.”

Off to my right, I saw a woman smiling. She was wearing a brilliant shawl that shone purple and green even in the meagre, miserly sunshine that the bad spot allowed to fall. As I watched her, open-mouthed that she could be so _light_ , she broke into a song.

* * *

There was a backlash from the Institute. Apparently, professionals felt that curse cleansing should be left to the professionals. 

“Klaus’ll weather it,” Mrs Bialosky said.

“They did a study,” Mrs Bialosky said. “Nightmares are down in that region. Can you believe it?” I could certainly believe that she’d suggested someone should do a study.

“And the pass?” I said.

She made a noncommittal sound. “Karesh said he’d get another land survey done; good — but Burrough's Construction’s holding on. Good and bad. Makes the dam look more viable. The timing will be interesting.” I got the feeling — whether this was over or not — she had already picked another battle.

* * *

But this is _after_ : poppies and lilies and wheat growing on the dead ground.

**Author's Note:**

> kurushi: This was the scene I mentioned that had stuck in my head but wouldn't fit in any of the other fic ideas. Thank you for providing it with a (-n implied) home.


End file.
